From War to Windrush

Sam King MBE served with the Royal Air Force and was Southwark's first black mayor. By kind permission of Sam King.

To mark the 60th anniversary of the arrival of the MV Empire Windrush in Britain in 1948, this exhibition tells the personal stories of the involvement of black men and women from the West Indies and Britain in the First and Second World Wars.

Among the exhibits on display are pages from the MV Empire Windrush passenger list; the RAF flying logbook of Cy Grant, a navigator in Bomber Command, who was shot down over The Netherlands during the Second World War and spent the rest of the war in German Prisoner of War camps; the MBE belonging to Sam King, who returned to Britain on the Windrush after serving in the RAF and was later the first black mayor of Southwark; and the telegram announcing the death of Walter Tull, the first black British Army officer.